Tim Cheadlehttp://timcheadle.com/posts2013-08-06T15:00:00ZTim CheadleStop Focusing on What You Don't Havehttp://timcheadle.com/posts/2013/08/06/stop-focusing-on-what-you-dont-have/2013-08-06T15:00:00Z2013-08-06T13:13:38-04:00Article Author<p>One of my favorite things to do is to meet other entrepreneurs. I love seeing other people get excited about building products. The conversations are usually interesting and make me consider situations and perspectives I’d never thought of.</p>
<p>However, these folks usually tell me they have a dilemma. They report that their idea is totally fleshed out but they need a designer. Or maybe their designs are workable; they just need a developer. Once the funding comes in, they can hire a marketing person. It’s always the same story.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>If only we had X, we could Y.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Stop thinking like this.</p>
<p>What you’re doing is framing your entire business around what you don’t have. This is not productive. You are focusing on what you can’t do instead of executing what you can.</p>
<p>Most people totally overestimate what’s required to test out a market and see if other people find their product valuable. In almost every case I come across, you can test out the idea with nothing more than a little elbow grease and grit. Would a developer help? Probably. Do you need a developer before you can make any progress on your business? I doubt it.</p>
<p>Are you starting an online store to sell menswear? Just use a spreadsheet and a phone. Sell to customers one by one before investing in a web storefront for products no one wants. You will learn more from selling the first $1,000 in person than the next $10,000 online.</p>
<p>Do you have a new project management strategy that just begs to be a web app? If it’s as good as you think, find someone to hire you to execute the strategy for their project. You will quickly find items you missed and “important” features that just aren’t necessary.</p>
<p>If you truly think you need a developer, maybe it’s time to go learn some code yourself. You don’t need to become an expert developer; you just need to learn how to build pieces of the business you’re aiming for. Writing “bad” code that furthers the progress and understanding of your business is a great step to take. Building something to throw away is more valuable than not having anything built.</p>
<p>The problem is not what you’re missing; it’s that you are not leveraging what you have. While you may not be a “tech person”, you have many other skills and resources that you can take advantage of. You may have a background in sales, marketing, or copywriting that most developers can only dream of. Why not take the time to exploit what you’re already capable of? Once you begin to feel the pain personally, it will become immediately obvious where your business should go.</p>
<p>In short, you already have what it takes. You don’t need anyone else to get started. Just get it done. Go make your own luck and discover new situations. Your business will be the better for it.</p>
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<strong>Thanks</strong> to <a href='http://twitter.com/bigfleet'>Jim Van Fleet</a> for his help editing this post. <a href='https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6167797'>Discuss on Hacker News</a>.
</footer>Notes from Kenya Harahttp://timcheadle.com/posts/2013/01/06/notes-from-kenya-hara/2013-01-06T00:00:00Z2013-05-07T15:38:03-04:00Article Author<p>While cleaning my office I found some notes I took from this <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenya_Hara'>Kenya Hara</a> talk at Google from a few years ago. Hara is the art director of <a href='http://www.muji.us/'>Muji</a> and designed the Olympic ceremonies in Japan in 1998. I thought I&#8217;d share my notes for posterity.</p>
<ul>
<li>Emptiness is the possibility and potential of being filled.</li>
<li>It is because emptiness is vacant that it is open to the opportunity of possibility.</li>
<li>Understanding is passed on not by preservation, but by duplication, gaining new understanding in the process.</li>
<li>Through constant renewal you determine what is eternal.</li>
</ul>
<p>You can watch the talk here in its entirety:</p>
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</iframe>Make Your Bed, Be More Productivehttp://timcheadle.com/posts/2012/06/29/make-your-bed-be-more-productive/2012-06-29T00:00:00Z2013-05-04T20:15:43-04:00Article Author<p><img alt='Make Your Bed' src='/images/posts/make_your_bed.jpg' /></p>
<p>About two years ago, I made the transition from working at a large corporate campus to working for myself, from home. To say I suffered culture shock is an understatement. During my entire corporate career, &#8220;working from home&#8221; meant waking up really late, catching up on episodes of Arrested Development, and taking a two hour lunch. Oh yeah, I checked email every once in a while. It was essentially a day off without burning any vacation time, and it was part of office culture.</p>
<p>Now that I own my own business, that behavior had to change. I was solely responsible for putting food on the table which meant I had to make my business work. I didn&#8217;t have someone I reported to that would berate me if the job wasn&#8217;t done; I was my own boss. The problem was that I had no idea how to be my own boss. Sure, I knew how to get my job done and how to make clients happy. What I lacked was the skill of making sure working from home involved actually working.</p>
<p>I tried setting up a dedicated office, removing clutter from my desk, only spending time in that room when I was &#8220;at work&#8221;. None of this was very effective. No problem; I figured I&#8217;d solve that by trying my hand at coworking. Surely being around other productive people would kick me into gear, right? Wrong. It only made me even more conscious of not being as productive as I wanted to be, nothing to actually improve it.</p>
<p>However, all of this changed when I started doing one thing: I made my bed.</p>
<p>Right after I stumble out of bed, I pull up the sheets and make sure my bed is tidy. I don&#8217;t spend a lot of time on it and I certainly don&#8217;t make <a href='http://artofmanliness.com/2009/11/19/how-to-make-a-bed-you-can-bounce-a-quarter-off-of/'>hospital corners</a>. Being perfect is not the goal. In fact, making my bed is just a means of accomplishing something more important, a easy habit resulting in a small victory.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a way for me to start my day by immediately being productive. Instead of lazing around for 30 minutes checking email and Twitter, I get out of bed, accomplish a task, and get my mind and body ready for work. Making my bed is a task that I don&#8217;t have to think about, I have to do every day, doesn&#8217;t require much effort and makes me feel good.</p>
<p>To be your own boss and be effective, you need to learn to be productive without external forces. You need to set your own goals and regulate your own behavior to accomplish them. What I needed was a simple system, a dependable, repeatable way of putting me in &#8220;work mode&#8221;. What I lacked was a routine, and for me making my bed is a really easy way of getting that back.</p>
<p><em><a href='http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4179301'>Discuss on Hacker
News</a></em></p>Lean Startups Are Like Sciencehttp://timcheadle.com/posts/2012/06/21/lean-startups-are-like-science/2012-06-21T00:00:00Z2013-05-07T15:38:34-04:00Article Author<p>I work with a lot of startups, and most of them these days aim to be a &#8220;lean startup&#8221;. The only problem is that folks always seem to misunderstand what a lean startup is or how to apply the techniques. Ultimately, a lean startup is no different from any other business. You need to find a balance between sales, marketing, bookkeeping, customer development and building your product. The right balance depends on your product, your personality and your staff.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re spending all of your time building your product, you&#8217;re likely ignoring what your customers have to say. You&#8217;re probably building exactly what they don&#8217;t need, resulting wasted effort and missed revenue.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re spending all of your time talking to your customers, it&#8217;s likely not providing a very clear focus for what you need to build and deliver. Are you sure you&#8217;re asking the right questions? Running a lean startup doesn&#8217;t mean letting the customers make your decisions for you. It means building something they value and want to pay you to use. As the old Henry Ford quote goes, &#8220;If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.&#8221;</p>
<p>I achieve a balance by acting like a scientist. I treat my business and my clients&#8217; businesses as a set of scientific experiments. Don&#8217;t just test things randomly and see what happens; use the following process:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Build a Hypothesis</strong><br />Come up with an idea about what product customers want and would pay you to have.</li>
<li><strong>Design the Experiment</strong><br />Build the product and focus on launching it, not perfecting it.</li>
<li><strong>Run the Experiment</strong><br />Launch quickly. Put the product in front of customers as soon as possible.</li>
<li><strong>Observe the Results</strong><br />Collect customer feedback and watch their use of the product. You&#8217;ll integrate this data into the next round.</li>
</ul>
<p>Rinse and repeat. Every time you repeat this process, you will have a more refined idea of what your customers expect, and an idea of what they might like but haven&#8217;t asked for.</p>
<p>Notice that I&#8217;m not spending all of my time in any one of these steps. In reality, they&#8217;re all happening in parallel. Also, in a successful business this process never actually ends. So long as you have customers, you have improvements to make.</p>
<p><em>(Adapted from my original post on <a href='http://lesseverything.com/blog/archives/2012/06/13/lean-startups-are-like-science/'>LessEverything&#8217;s blog</a>, which was itself adapted from my <a href='http://www.quora.com/Lean-Startups/How-does-your-startup-use-Lean-Startup-principles'>Quora answer</a> on the same topic.)</em></p>
<p><em><a href='http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4143041'>Discuss on Hacker News</a></em></p>Design Thinkinghttp://timcheadle.com/posts/2012/06/20/design-thinking/2012-06-20T00:00:00Z2013-05-05T02:01:33-04:00Article Author<p>A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at <a href='http://www.atlantaobjectivists.com/atloscon-2012'>ATLOSCon</a> with my friend and fellow designer, <a href='http://www.redqueenstudio.com/'>Tori Press</a>. The conference was loosely focused on philosophy and individual values, so we wanted to give people a brief overview of what design is, what it isn&#8217;t, and how it relates to living your life. Here&#8217;s the abstract we originally proposed to the confererence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design is not art. Design is not engineering. Design is not making</p>
</blockquote>
<p>pretty things. Good design is not done based on whims or feelings. Instead, design is a rational process, a mixture of many disciplines, drawing on artistic creativity, engineering process and precision, and philosophy, in order to solve human problems. Once you understand how to think about design and what it means to produce &#8220;good design&#8221;, you begin to see so many more realms in your life in which the design process is applicable. Whether it&#8217;s uncluttering and decorating your house, building a system to manage your personal finances, or simply making a newsletter for your business, you are practicing design. This talk will focus on overarching principles of good design that you can use in your everyday life to make this process tangible and fun.</p>
<p>I had a blast giving this talk with Tori and designing the slides. Enjoy!</p>
<script src='http://speakerdeck.com/embed/4fc046a066174c001f0073af.js' type='text/javascript'>
</script>Why I Left Google and Learned to Love Failurehttp://timcheadle.com/posts/2011/10/20/why-i-left-google-and-learned-to-love-failure/2011-10-20T00:00:00Z2013-05-05T02:02:18-04:00Article Author<p>I was invited to give a talk at the first annual <a href='http://www.pajamaconf.com'>PajamaConf</a> this weekend and it was a blast. I spoke about my story of going to work for Google, having the time of my life, but realizing I wanted more and moving on. My goal was not to enlighten the audience about my life story, but rather to impart some wisdom I learned along the way.</p>
<p>I plan on writing more about this in the coming weeks, but for now here’s the short slide desk I prepared. Apparently people like it; it’s gone from 66 to 43,000+ views in about 24 hours on SlideShare. Enjoy!</p>
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